Most people in this audience know the work on Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, whose model is having considerable impact on Western understanding of the full range of consciousness. Fewer, I think, know of the life and work of Swami Vivekananda, senior to Sri Aurobindo by nine years, and the teacher of what I term Integral Vedanta. ... The similarity I shall demonstrate between these models may occasion some skepticism in this audience, but we know from Sri Aurobindo himself that there was a direct connection between himself, Ramakrishna and Vivekananda.

Debashish’s Seven Quartets of Becoming helped me flesh out and understand more fully the systematism in the work of Sri Aurobindo (another Indian who spent his life reconciling the dichotomous relationship between India and the West) ... In Sri Aurobindo’s Quartets it is quite clear that he is establishing conceptual fields through which he proposes to guide us as we develop. The next slide provides a sampling of how Vivekananda and Aurobindo define these paired fields:

Here we have the headings for the two fields that I worked out from the Integral Vedantic data and Aurobindo created by himself. There is time only to comment on Level I where Vivekananda posits within the conceptual side of Spiritual Humanism Humanistic Vedanta, a kind of manifesto for India to put Vedanta into a framework that validates the human individual. At the same position Aurobindo presents the general elements of perfection, a listing of the various Indian traditions behind the individual aspiring to transformation.

On the experiential side Vivekananda speaks of spiritual democracy, the “experiential space” essential to the development of spiritual humanism in the West. Sri Aurobindo gives us here integral becoming, that refers to his whole integral system in terms of experience, enjoyment, joy. To my mind, this may be the most original aspect of the Integral picture: looking at two complementary sides of the picture at any given juncture and working on how to resolve the complementarity between them. It contrasts with traditional Sankhya and Vedanta that vehemently stressed the irreducible complementarity of conceptualism and experientialism, as more or less did Tantra. It also contrasts with the rigid conceptualism that dominates Abrahamic understanding of consciousness in the West and seems to have led to the ferocious suppression of mystical or experiential movements throughout Western history.

Putting the resolution of millennial separation of the conceptual and experiential aspects of the human psyche at the center of its model, Integral is in a way moving to a whole new concept of what it is to be human and opening the door to infinite resolutions and unheard-of reconciliations. We can see this in the phenomenon of Vivekananda’s work, which conveyed to India the conceptual side of his own training, no doubt to help the Indians digest and organize their fantastically varied and diverse traditions based largely on experience. In the West he conveyed the experiential side of his training most likely to inject into the rather rigid conceptual structure of Western consciousness something of the plasticity, effortless ability to transform and variety that comes from bringing state experience to bear on all that we do.